Chapter 6 The Name on the File #2
Harriet was quiet for a moment. "That is an accurate characterization of the situation."
"And the child — Juliette. Does she know anything?"
"She's four. She knows her mother died. On the basis of what Vivienne's solicitor has indicated in communications, Juliette has been told her papa is unknown, which is age-appropriate for the present moment. Nothing further."
A four-year-old. He was building a picture of something he had no preparation for, no architecture to house.
A child who had spent four years in a world that contained him without him knowing it, and he had been in boardrooms and on platforms in front of investors and sitting in screening rooms in Bavaria with a woman he loved, and somewhere in the Jura a small girl with dark hair — he assumed dark hair, it was probably irrelevant and he couldn't help it — had been learning to walk and then to talk and then, presumably, to ask the question that four-year-olds arrived at eventually, the question that was actually the first really serious philosophical inquiry a person made in their life.
Where is my father?
He became aware that he had put his hand over the watch on his wrist — the plain steel watch that had not left his wrist since his father died, the one that Anya had mentioned once, in the mountain refuge, asking with her eyes rather than her voice whether there was a story in it.
He had not told her the story then. He had intended to tell her the story eventually.
He thought now that he had been waiting for a version of himself who had earned the telling.
"What do I need to do," he said.
Harriet walked him through it. The DNA process, the court's timeline, the formal response his solicitors would file, the communication protocols with Vivienne Marchetti's legal representatives.
There were forms. There were dates. There was a particular form of necessary patience that the legal system imposed on all crises, no matter how much money you had or how many people worked for you, because courts operated on their own schedule and that was, arguably, the point.
He listened. He asked questions. He signed the two documents that required his signature in this meeting. He did all of this in the voice of a man who managed variables.
He collected his coat at forty minutes past the hour, thanked Harriet's assistant by name, and walked out onto Davies Street.
It was raining.
Not heavily — a London rain, light and persistent, the kind that had decided not to make a scene but simply to be present. He turned his collar up and walked.
He walked without a destination, which was unusual for him.
His phone was in his coat pocket. He was aware of it the way you become aware of a sound that should not be in a quiet room — its presence was the anomaly.
He had seventeen unread messages, he knew, because he had last looked at seven-fifteen that morning and he was now — he checked the watch — nearly ten past twelve.
Marcus had sent three. His communications director, Declan, had sent two.
There was probably something from the Sterling Tech general counsel about the IPO.
There was, almost certainly, something from the airline about his return flight.
He walked.
At some point — he wasn't tracking distance, only the sound of his own footsteps and the rain and the particular quality of Mayfair in winter, which smelled of stone and exhaust and the faint memory of old money — he found himself standing outside a members' club whose green door he knew from three or four dinners a year, all of them professional, none of them chosen for comfort.
He stood on the pavement for a moment. He went inside.
The dining room on the ground floor was partially occupied at this hour — four tables, quiet conversation, the kind of restraint that this particular club had been enforcing since 1897.
He was shown to the small private dining room at the rear, which he had not requested but which the ma?tre d' offered with the sort of practised intuition that came from reading the faces of men who needed not to be looked at.
He ordered something. He couldn't have said what, specifically. Something with protein. Something that would arrive without drama.
The room was paneled in dark walnut and lit by two sconces and the grey light from the window, which faced a narrow courtyard where rain was currently accumulating in a stone urn. The table was set for one. The napkin was linen.
He sat in the silence of it and thought.
He thought about Geneva, because there was no way around Geneva.
Five years ago he had been a different shape — not different in the ways that people sometimes claimed, not fundamentally altered, but the edges had been sharper then, the convictions more absolute.
He had believed, at thirty-five, in systems. In the logic of deliberate choices and clean exits.
He had constructed his personal life the way he'd constructed his first term sheets: identify the goal, map the risk, do not introduce variables you cannot account for.
Delphine Marchetti had not been a variable he had not accounted for.
She had been, as far as he had understood, a clean and mutual situation between two adults who knew what they were doing.
And then she had left. Or he had left. One of them had moved on first and the other had followed, and the whole thing had resolved cleanly, exactly as intended.
Except it hadn't.
She had gone home from Geneva with something she hadn't told him about, and she had made a decision — in isolation, without telling anyone except perhaps Vivienne — and then she had raised a daughter alone for four years, and then she had died.
He thought about that: the dying of it. The cardiac event.
Sudden, he assumed, the way Harriet had described it — no preceding diagnosis, no time to arrange.
Here and then not here. He thought about what she might have been doing, in the hours before, if she had known.
Whether she would have made different choices. Whether she would have contacted him.
He thought: probably not. He thought: because the letter to Vivienne made the logic clear.
She had not wanted Juliette's paternity established.
She had made the decision she'd made because she had thought it through and arrived somewhere, and he was not going to sit in a private dining room and decide she had been wrong when she had known, with certainty, far more about the situation than he had.
A child existed in the world who might be his.
A child existed in the world who probably was his, because the timeline was what it was and because Delphine had apparently been certain enough to write it in a letter intended only for her sister.
He thought about what that meant.
He had spent — he did the calculation without wanting to — four years on the planet at the same time as a small girl in the Jura, and in those four years he had built a new campus, he had gone through the second funding round, he had stood in a mountain refuge in Bavaria and failed to tell a woman about a watch, and then he had returned to London and made a promise, and then he had actually — finally, improbably — allowed himself to love someone in the particular way that love required you to hold your own interior loosely enough for another person to move through it.
He had done all of that.
And a four-year-old named Juliette, with no father on her birth certificate, had been alive for all of it.
The food arrived. He looked at it without recognition.
It was a piece of fish over some kind of grain — he had evidently ordered well.
He picked up the fork and ate three bites because his body expected protein at this hour and because the alternative was sitting in front of an untouched plate and he was not prepared to be the man who sat in front of an untouched plate in a wood-paneled dining room.
He thought about Anya.
This was where his thinking had been circling for the past hour, and he had been keeping it at the edge rather than looking at it directly, because looking at it directly required him to admit that he had been doing the thing again — the thing she had named, in the kitchen of the opera house four nights ago, at an hour when the house was quiet and she had been talking about herself but she had, as she sometimes did, accidentally described him more precisely than she'd described herself.
I keep waiting for the good thing to stop.
He had held her hands in the dark of the kitchen and thought: I know.
He had thought it and not said it. He had thought it and understood, with the specific clarity that came at that hour of the morning, that his version of the same anxiety was not passive waiting but active management — that he handled every difficult thing alone not because he was strong but because allowing someone else to be present for the difficult thing was the version of vulnerability that most frightened him.
The version that required you to remain in the room while someone else saw you uncertain.
He had been uncertain since the airfield yesterday morning.